Attack of the geeks

A cadre of computer whizzes plans to expose DISD's finances to the world

A loose alliance of computer experts, dubbed the "Geek Garrison" by their leader, has descended on the Dallas Independent School District, demanding all of the district's financial records for the last two decades. When they get it, the geeks plan to post all of the information on the World Wide Web.

At least one well-known critic of the district says the computer campaign could blow the roof right off DISD headquarters.

But that, the geeks say, is not their ultimate goal.
They want more than that.
Wouldn't you know it: They want to change the world.

The computer experts are looking at DISD as a proving ground for a technology they plan to replicate all over the society, revolutionizing politics and democracy itself in the process.

"Increasingly in the 21st century, citizenship will be empowered by people who use their technical skills to help people make informed decisions," says Kendall Clark, one of the geeks and president of the North Texas Linux Users Group.

Education activist Russell Fish, himself a geek, made a formal demand on DISD a month ago that it turn over all of its financial records dating to the early 1970s. Backed by lawyers from the Texas Justice Foundation, Fish also is suing DISD for broad testing data, which he also plans to publish on the Internet.

While DISD drags its feet on both requests, Fish already has built a computer to process the data, and he and other experts have created a search engine--a program that will enable anybody, sophisticated or not, to call up Fish's Web page and start asking questions.

"A parent could go to the page and say, 'Well, OK, just exactly how much did the district spend on window frames last year?' And, zip, here comes the answer.

Fish's Web page is already up and running, with the search engine in place and the computer "just sitting there twiddling its thumbs, waiting for the data to show up." A link to the page is on the Dallas Observer's Web site at www.dallasobserver.com.

The service Fish proposes will merely bring politics up to the same vantage point that business has enjoyed for some years now, according to Laurence Jolidon, editor and publisher of State & Local Insider, an Internet service based in Dallas. Many businesses now use the Internet to plug consumers directly into the kind of product information that used to be available only through salespeople.

Jolidon, whose company provides government data to a mainly business clientele, says he thinks the project proposed by Fish is revolutionary.

"It's hard to predict, of course, because politics is so fluid, but then so is the Internet. It's almost the perfect match," Jolidon says.

Closer to home and to brass tacks, the mechanism that Russell Fish and company propose promises some really exciting political fireworks, says longtime DISD critic Richard Finlan, who has spent years demanding data from DISD and then painstakingly searching it by hand. Finlan predicts the real story exposed by the system Fish proposes will be the sheer volume of cash that will turn up missing.

So far, the district is not arguing that the information Fish is seeking is not public. The school district says it just doesn't want to stop doing what it's doing and work on Fish's huge request unless Fish pays it to do so, according to DISD spokesman Jon Dahlander.

"We also have an obligation to protect the public's interest, and we just don't have enough staff around here to retrieve records of this magnitude unless there is a reimbursement for the labor involved," he says.

There are more profound misgivings about the project in other quarters.
"I just don't think raw data will produce anything that people will be able to understand," says veteran school board member Yvonne Ewell. "People still need someone to interpret the data for them."

But it's just that kind of official possessiveness of information that draws the geeks to the battle in the first place, according Clark, the Linux person.

Linux itself, Clark explained, is an internationally successful computer operating system that has been developed for free by a loose confederacy of volunteer programmers and is distributed for free all over the world.

Why free?
"Because we don't like Microsoft," Clark says.
And here is the center of the weave--geeks to DISD to blowing off the roof to world freedom/world domination. Linux is a computer system devised and propagated by people who think knowledge should be free and universal.

Fish says most of the geeks involved in his effort are gifted intellectually, like Clark, who is a computer genius and doctoral candidate in religious studies at SMU.

"Most of these guys," Fish says, "are running around in sandals and ponytails all day with way too much time to think."